Perhaps the professor should cut class

What troubles me or bothers me?

The student found his own subject, aimed at his own audience, and selected a form which delivered his information and its meaning to his audience. (169).

This is fine, but in school and work, we don't often have the luxury of finding our own subjects. And most college students will be either given subjects or will be given a range of choices within a subject (or given options within constraints).

The student made the primary diagnosis of his own paper. The student stated his principal writing problem at the top of the first page, and evaluated his success in solving it at the bottom of the last page. (169)

While it's good to get students thinking about, owning, and reflecting on their own work, if we believe that FYC is intended to help prepare students for the academic writing tasks they will confront in the university (an assumption I'm not sure Don shared), then the diagnosis they'll need most is the one we give them, as members of disciplines with traditions, etc.

Without the crutch of assignments... (170)

Is it realistic not to give students assignments?

The instructor, along with his students, learns there can be no absolute standards, no certain superiority of one subject matter over another or one genre over another. Good writing is good writing. (171)

And of course I want to push back against this...good writing is never just good writing.

Our experience in teaching one-on-one reaffirmed our distrust of assignments. The assignment gives the student too much. It does his work for him, or rather, the teacher does his work for him, telling him what to say and how to say it. But the teacher who eliminates assignments has to be prepared for student resentment. It's difficult to find a subject, to discover something worth saying, and the student would prefer the teacher to provide the crutch of an assignment. Our students were forced, often it seemed for the first time, to think, to think critically, to find out that the unexamined life is, indeed, not worth living, and the examined life is exciting. (171)

Is it realistic to expect that the student will "find" a subject or "discover something worth saying" within the constraints of a discipline without the teacher's help?

What do I want to keep?

The more they wrote, however, the more they realized that the ability to write is not a gift but a skill which could be acquired through diligence and practice. (170)

The strongest motivating force for our students was the discoveries they made about themselves and their world through the evolution of the writing process. They learned that the counsel, "Know what you want to say before you say it," was fallacious. The writer finds out what he has to say by writing. (170)

As our students shared their evaluation of their work with our response they began to realize there is no right and wrong in writing. There is what works and what doesn't work; what communicates and what doesn't communicate. They found that what is appropriate for one paper in one form, aimed at a specific audience, may not be appropriate in another paper. (170-71). Wow...this flies in the face of the expressivist categorization Murray may have gotten and places him squarely within the rhetorical axiology (Fulkerson, 1990).

When there is no class meeting, however, the student cannot compete with his classmates; he is forced to compete with himself, to attempt to write better each time than he wrote before. (171)

We also found all our students capable of diagnosing a key writing problem on a paper, and they were therefore capable of suggesting a treatment...We did discover, however, that our students were better at spotting a weakness than a strength. Often our most important job in conference was to give the student the confidence he had earned. Our students learned most when they could work from a position of strength. (172) Murray employs Elbows "believing game" and he exhibits genuine good will and generosity towards students.

The teacher must remember his role and not over-teach. It is not his responsibility to correct a paper line by line, to rewrite it until it is his own writing. It is the student's responsibility to improve the paper and the teacher's responsibility to make a few suggestions which may help the student improve. Sometimes the instructor may want to edit a sentence, a paragraph, or even several paragraphs in consultation with the student. But ultimately it is the student, not the teacher, who corrects the paper. To learn, the student must rewrite his own paper, not merely accept his teacher's editing. (172) A respect for the student's own work.

Murray's Desire to Go-Against-the-Grain:

We discovered, first of all, that all the predictors of success in composition--test scores, academic record, social-economic background, maturity-simply did not predict individual performance when we responded to the students individually. Our best students were sometimes our colleagues' worst students, and our colleagues' best students our worst. (171) Enemies: tests, grades, background, maturity.

In conference we found our colleagues' belief that most beginning college students are over-confident about their writing ability to be unfounded. We had the cocky-creative and the kooky-creative, but they were in the minority. Most of our students realized their writing was weak and needed improvement. Once given the opportunity to write and rewrite, they seized it. We had more students who wrote more than was required than those who wrote less and were dropped. (172)

Enemies: cynical colleagues